Sundays are hard

Here I am again.

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm frustrated, angry, helpless, and lonely all at once. Like when the high school youth group gets a turn leading the musical worship: I'm trying to sing along but everything is just...off.

Sometimes I wish I hated my church.

It has been a painful journey but I am now at peace with sloughing off the "evangelical Christian" label. I no longer feel the discordant crush of contradictory feelings and beliefs that holding onto White American Evangelicalism forced me into. I feel a freedom to question everything and find a faith that is more beautiful, inclusive, and academically rigorous. I feel thinly restrained fury when I look at what the American church has become now that I am choosing to be an outsider. Being able to hate (or at least feel repelled by) the evangelical church has made it easy to discard.

But I don't hate my church.

My church is full of people who love fiercely. My church has urged vaccination and followed science during this never-ending pandemic. My church fights for social justice. My church criticizes politicians who call for violence and hate. My church prays for those same politicians. My church leans into hard conversations. My church doesn't silence dissenting voices.

My church does not allow women to hold the position of pastor or elder.

My church does not affirm the fluidity of gender or non-heterosexual relationships.

How do you weigh that which you find beautiful against that which you find unconscionable?

Very few people will argue that the differing theological positions on women in leadership disqualify Christians from Christianity. Indeed, the timbre of the discussion is almost always one of melancholic disagreement. It's as if all Christians are seated around a giant Thanksgiving meal and trying to uncomfortably navigate an unexpected (but unavoidable) foray into politics. But for all of the forced, awkward conciliatory discussion, it is a point of fact that a complementarian position puts limits on what Christians can do in a church context based on something intrinsic to their personhood: their bodies. If you are a woman in a complementarian church, you cannot become an elder or a pastor. You are excluded from the highest leadership positions because of the shape and function of your body. The same line of argumentation could be applied to LGBTQ+ issues though I recognize that is a bit more contentious so I'll leave that alone for now.

When it comes to issues that limit access based on intrinsic characteristics, we have a responsibility to be absolutely airtight in our reasoning if we are going to hold to those views.

Is the issue of women in leadership resolved? If a google search of "complementarianism vs egalitarianism" doesn't disabuse you of any notion of certainty in biblical interpretation on this topic then I'm not sure I know how to have this conversation with you. But even those who DO believe their position is airtight generally accept that this is not a "salvific issue" (if you get this one wrong God isn't going to revoke your salvation). Once again, I would urge you to explore all of the Biblical arguments against homosexual relationships and see how they have been challenged by modern thinkers. My personal favorite is that the creation narrative is frequently cited as the "divine ideal" and therefore Adam and Eve's relationship demonstrates God's intent for marriage but heterosexuality is never explicitly demanded in that pre-fall narrative. You know what IS explicitly demanded: eating vegetarian. Just some food for thought (see what I did there?). But I digress.

If my church can accept that there are valid viewpoints on these issues that are inclusive of marginalized people groups, how can we continue to hold onto the discriminatory positions as part of our core theology?

A helpful heuristic for me in thinking through thorny questions like this is to swap out one historically oppressed group for another. How would we look at 1
Timothy if instead of "woman and man" it was "gentile and Jew", "slave and master", or "African and European"? When I think of this whole mess, I just feel frustrated. I tune in on Sunday and watch people I love do and say things that I agree with while holding in the back of my mind that these same people have also chosen as the bedrock of our church theological positions that I find antithetical to the person of Jesus and ethically unconscionable.

So here I am again.

Lord, have mercy.